We have been noticing that some SEO professional are now calling themselves SERP Experts. This is not so much because SERP is that different than SEO (it is one type of SEO) but because SERP still sounds fancy and its meaning is not that known by the general public who doesn’t work in the SEO industry. Continue reading SERP Expert? Sounds Fancy. What exactly is SERP?

Google Profile is One of Google’s Many Professional Services

Your company might have been using Google AdWords for several years without looking into additional (and yes, free) member account features Google is offering. Yes, the Google search engine and Google AdWords are what Google is most known for but there are also other features that Google would like you to try out. Continue reading Have You Created a Profile in Google Profiles?

Relying on your social networks’ recommendations is the new trend to which Google is also tapping in with their recently announced +1 like feature. So far the reception of this news hasn’t been crazy excited. Somehow the idea feels forced and too close to what Facebook is already doing. Regardless, Google is an institution and will most likely get people tapping their fingers. This is an additional factor to be taken into account in SEO. Google will for sure keep their heads up in trying to prevent any artificial +1 liking with the aim of showing up higher in search results. Dallas web design & SEO company Interaria follows closely the +1 development by Google and will advise our clients accordingly.

First, before going further, what is a walled garden, exactly? Wiki states that “a walled garden refers to a carrier’s or service provider’s control over applications, content, and media on platforms (such as mobile devices) and restriction of convenient access to non-approved applications or content.” Continue reading Empowered Online Shoppers In A Modern Walled Garden?

By far, the dominant advertising platform on the web is Google’s AdWords. Up until very recently, Google’s AdWords was fine with serving ads to mobile devices that linked to pages with Flash content. In a recent change in policy, Google’s AdWords seems to now block serving pay-per-click ads to mobile devices (iPad/iPhone/Android) if the advertised website being linked to in the ad has any Flash running on it. This includes websites running javascript coded “Flash-checkers”. Google’s AdWords now requires that at least on your site’s initial landing/home page where you may have used a Javascript based Flash checker, you’ll now need to instead add specialized web code for checking what type of device has arrived to your home page, and then auto-route a visitor to appropriate mobile friendly Flash free content.

The situation is definitely not completely clear yet because Google hasn’t made any official statements on the matter. Since Goolge’s own Android mobile platform supports Flash this new policy is interesting, and appears to cater the growing market of iPhone and iPad users.

Dallas Web design & development company Interaria follows the developments of AdWord policy closely. Interaria specializes in coding websites that are “Google-friendly”.

In addition to following your website’s Google Page Rank, and the number of backlinks pointing to your site, another metric to check when following your website’s search engine optimization progress is called Alexa Rank.

Alexa is a website indexing engine that attempts to measure popularity of websites. Alexa gathers its data on websites as does Google by using ‘searchbots’ that crawl the Web reading and storing data from websites. Like Google, Alexa crawls the Internet, retrieving and storing lots of data about websites and the popularity of websites. However, unlike Google, Alexa builds their popularity rank from data sent to them by people who have installed an Alexa Toolbar into their web browser. If you have the Alexa Toolbar installed into your browser, every time you visit a website, data is sent to Alexa, telling Alexa what websites you have visited. In this way, Alexa is able to build a ranking popularity index of which websites are visited most. The highest, most visited/popular site, has an Alexa Rank of 1, which is currently held by Google. For example, Apple Computer’s main website has an Alexa Rank of 41 and Dell Computer has an Alexa Rank of 200. However, most websites have ranks in the hundreds of thousands or millions.

Google does not make public all the factors that go into how high your website will rank on search results pages, but tracking how your site’s Alexa rank changes over time, whether your Alexa Rank goes up or down, can be an early indicator as to how your website’s Google ranking and search engine results maybe be changing and improving.

A copy of the Alexa database is used for the Internet Archive ( http://waybackmachine.org/ ). Google and Alexa also partner on supporting the Open Directory Project ( http://www.dmoz.org/ ).